IT was not too long ago that the movement against single-use plastic straws took the world by storm. In a short few years, city after city, and country after country, took up the call to enact plastic straw bans for the sake of environmental protection and waste reduction. Among them was Malaysia, which in 2018 set a goal towards eliminating single-use plastics by 2030, with policies to rid eateries of plastic straws initiated in 2019.
In response, many F&B outlets turned to non-plastic straw alternatives such as paper straws, which for many, were far from the ideal substitute. In addition to their notorious tendency to wilt during use, paper straws often come with coating material that make them difficult to recycle, rendering them not quite the eco-friendly sipping saviours they were made out to be.
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